Matt Capozzi was sipping a cold pint on one of the rickety old wooden chairs at Lucky Lab, a cavernous old-school beer hall in Northwest Portland, when he looked at his beer glass and imagined what it’d be like to have Mount Hood in the base.
“Mount Hood is just so iconic,” he says of Oregon’s tallest peak, which looms on the horizon east of Portland. As a product design person who had worked for Burton Snowboards, Nike, and video game-publisher Electronic Arts, Capozzi thought he could make it happen. Moreover, it seemed like everyone Capozzi talked to really wanted it to happen. As if by kismet, the Mount Hood glass all but willed itself into existence.
“I shared the idea with my wife that night. I said, ‘Hey, Leigh, we had this idea at dinner—a glass with Mount Hood in the base,’” he says. “And she said ‘Whoa, that’s a big idea!’ And I paused, because as a product guy, I have lots of ideas that I’ve shared with her over the years, and none of them ever got that response.”
North Drinkware’s iconic mountain-bottomed glasses are still made by hand at Elements, a Portland glass-blowing company.
With their friend Nic Ramirez, the Capozzis started North Drinkware. All three are snowboarders who feel spiritually connected to the snow-capped peaks of the Cascades. The company offered a way to bring that home while also celebrating the rise of craft beer in Portland. Matt reached out to contacts at Elements Glass, a renowned glass-blowing company that makes hand-blown pieces at a factory in Northwest Portland just five blocks from the pub where the idea was born. He learned it wouldn’t be easy for Elements to make a pint glass with a 3D rendering of Mount Hood from U.S. Geological Survey data in the base—but it was possible.
Originally envisioning the mountain glass company as a fun side project, the trio launched a Kickstarter fundraising campaign with a goal of $15,000 to buy the supplies needed for Elements to make 100 glasses for North Drinkware to sell and a few more for the founders to give friends and relatives. They blew by their humble goal in just a few hours.
North Drinkware’s Kickstarter ended up with $550,000 in pre-orders, giving the project a massive amount of seed money, but also turning it into a major commitment to the patrons who had supported them. Such a meteoric rise has crushed many Kickstarter projects, but having experience in project development allowed Matt Capozzi to turn the simple idea into a real business.
“We thought we’d be doing this in our basement,” Capozzi says. “But everything sort of clicked over to a more professional scale, and thankfully, we had the experience to make that happen.”
Since then, they have added mountain peaks of Washington, Colorado, California, and Vermont to their pint and tumbler lineup. Each is still made by hand in the fiery furnaces at Elements Glass using a process that takes 15 hours. As luck would have it, Elements is one of the nation’s top glass studios, and one of the few in the country that can handle the volume of hand-blown glass the project demands.
Today, the glasses are still made in Portland at Elements Glass, while the company’s topographical wood coasters are made by Shwood, a wood-framed eyewear brand in southeast Portland. The tubes and packaging the glasses come in are made in Northeast Portland. “Everything about our product is made locally, which was very important to us,” Capozzi says. “We love celebrating local makers and craftsmen.”
North Drinkware is now expanding into home goods with a new product, a custom jacquard wool blanket designed and made in partnership with Pendleton Woolen Mills that features a map of Mount Hood. Like the glasses, this blanket is made in Oregon.
“Really, our big idea is that we want to find ways to have people bring the mountains home into their house in a unique way,” Capozzi says. “That’s what our driving force is—we want people to be able to celebrate their stories about the mountains, think about your day on the hill, and have those memories.”